


A Roost For Every Bird

by fresne



Category: Cities (Anthropomorphic)
Genre: Cat2, Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 09:48:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1092476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/pseuds/fresne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone who belonged to London said of her, "London is a bad habit one hates to lose."</p><p>A City was made up of the people who live within him or her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Roost For Every Bird

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sirona](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sirona/gifts).



> The following inspiration for this work and inspiration for my dialogue, where I am not directly quoting, because apt quotes are cool:  
> Not going to tell you. They're the phrases in quotes. Words not mine. Go forth and wander the london of quotations. She's a lovely A to zed.

Someone who belonged to London said of her, "London is a bad habit one hates to lose."

People left London all the time. There were train lines that spread out from London where suburbs in her greater area sprang up. Her Jesme Miller was laughing when she took the train that carried her away from London. That was choice. England deported ships worth of London's people and sent them across seas all for such little things. Her Black Heart Tom was crying like a baby when they sent him away. London never saw either of them again.

A City was made up of the people who live within him or her.

She'd been a Celtic maiden village with a braided woad pattern on her cheek when Rome had come forcefully wooing. He'd waxed on and on about his nine hills and founding by wolf raised brats. She'd been overwhelmed by the attention. Even after being burned down by a Celtic Queen, Rome had with great gusto rebuilt her.

Her Aelwen living next to the laundry by Roman built walls, never did marry any of the legionnaires she took to her bed. Her Caius Septimus loved a wine merchant's life in a place where it was green.

But Rome abandoned her when he abandoned all his imperial cities. She'd been abandoned by her people too. She always tried to remember that. The walled city of Londinum was abandoned for a time, until the Vikings had her Alfred the Great shoving the Anglo Saxons back into the stiff stays of her Roman walls.

She'd been empty and she could have died. That could happen to a city. She remembered proud Petra until the trade routes pulled away from him.

Cities were born and Cities died.

Her Sir Conan Doyle called her, "that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained."

People arrived in London every day. Sometimes a trickle. Sometimes a flood. Her Tijani Grey, he came from a warm island with palms to huddle damn cold in Lambeth. He was just as much hers as her Bastard William, who smiled when the first stone of the tower he built for her was laid.

Her Stephen Fry said of English and of her, "proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore."

She was not a whore, or not simply so. She was a ladylike thug in the broad streets of the world. She, without ill will, shameless sat in the centre to shake down entire civilizations for what she wanted. Traded and sold too, and if Canary Wharf made her a whore, well, her Gimcrack Jane had walked round and round St. Martins in the Field enough times to sell a poxy body for what Gimcrack Jane's babies were needing. Her Sixteen Strings Jack had lightfingered London's streets to get what he was needing too, whiskey and silk togs and all that made life grand. He'd danced a jig for it in the end. There was a reason that her Daniel Defoe imagined Moll Flanders as he did. Moll was like a pale imitation of sometimes choleric and sometimes tubercular London.

Her Peter Ackroyd said of her, "London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London."

She treasured all that she'd acquired in her sprawling British Museum like a dragon, like a Smaug, like a festival in the Great Smog of 1952. She presented faces with her National Gallery. Her Tate was a jewel box of a museum. Too small to hold it all, London had added a Tate Modern, because London was a puzzle of a city and she never stopped providing. Of a day cold and wintery, her Cristabel Contrey would haunt the V&A and dream of velvet and glass. No whore London, because she let all comers in freely. A trollop then.

Her Samuel Johnson said of her, "Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists."

It was a simple truth of things that it is possible to tell when the people who live in a city have had money by what buildings they built and when and in what way. Her Biron Bush squatted for twenty years in an abandoned Georgian. Her Pentunia Petronella graced a steel and glass apartment with a view of a Victorian brick wall.

A city with a single medieval centre and more modern off to the west was a place with great gaps in when flush flunds flowed down whatever river or port lay at its centre. Not that London was saying anything against Barcelona. After all, they industrialized at the same time and London can still feel the steel muscles of it.

Because steel. Victoria and Albert, but London loved steel. It girded her underpinnings. It pinned her undergirders. There were trees and flowers of the stuff. Her Philippa McMasters gravely taught flower arrangements at the Chelsea Flower Show, while wearing a rose made of steel on her lavender suit jacket.

Tracts of steel lay under London's streets carrying her people. Great lines that all fed into London spun out and away from her. Not to forget her canals, which came with the steel and connected with her Thames to the sea.

There's this one spot that her Mahet Pusillar loves. Where a pretty house lined canal curves next to a building that looks like any other, but it's not. There are no rooms in this building. It's just a front for an air vent to her Underground. He sits at a cafe drinking green tea by the gallon feeling the movement of steel and watching ugly barges bulk by flower potted homes.

Her Byron said of her, "A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping, dirty and dusty, but as wide as eye could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping in sight, then lost amidst the forestry. Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping on tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy; a huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown on a fool's head—and there is London Town."

She has historied patterns to her streets. She'd never had a Haussmann, not like Paris, with her wide boulevards. No, after the Great Fire, her Robert Hooke could convince no one to adopt grid like streets.

In truth, she'd hate to be some grid patterned city without any mistakes, and with only a highway to bring people in.

She was still quite baffled by Las Vegas, and what that gentleman will do when the lights go out.

A city is made up of his or her people, and those cities that have never been abandoned or gutted by fire or plague, well, London pities them in a way. She knows that she can survive anything short of the fall of civilization by now.

Actually, come to think of it, she could survive that too. She'd done it before. She'd do it again.

Her Jane Austen said of her, "the truth is, that in London it is always a sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be."

London'd survived plague time and again. Her Jenny Turner died before that London child was five. There was a time most children born to London did.

Her Jazzage Baby, Petra Smythe, high on cocaine and gin stumbled to the feet of Queen Anne's statue and laughed and laughed to see the statue pointing at a shop selling liquor.

London had been rebuilt from fire. Her Westminster Abbey was built in the Romanesque style it was true, but it was Saint Paul's classical dome that was in a style that was all London's, or her Christopher Wren's, which amounted to the same thing. Wreathed in the smoke of WWII air raids was how her Maude Goldsmith would always think of Saint Pauls. Wreathed in smoke and still standing.

London held no grudges against Berlin so long a house divided, but still she remembered in the pockmarks on buildings and the odd shattered ruin. Keep Calm and Carry on. Mind the Gap.

The Magna Carta had minded her ancient privileges. She minded them too.

Sometimes, she was a house divided. Riots and riotous. Even she acknowledges her whole Guy Fawkes thing doesn't make a great deal of sense. Her Jocko Black beat down her Mohinder Chopra until Jocko's hands were red with it in a riot that never got a name.

There was this spot where the remnants of the rookeries where her Jack the Ripper stalked through teaming crowded streets and immigrants washed up to her shores came block to facing block with her City face in a glass gleaming building that housed a bank. Her Gemma Gupta loved that spot. She thought it was beautiful and spray painted a blossoming man on a wall to show her gratitude for that beauty. Gemma didn't know she was covering up an early Banksy. She'd have smiled if she'd known.

London remembered when she could barely breathe. When all the world knew about her London particulars and pea soup fog. When chimney sweeps and chancery clerks and cheeky lads with their cats set upon becoming the Mayor. She made that happen.

Her Charles Dickens walked her streets late at night. He was not, Mr. Carkerish self-promotion to the contrary, a nice man. She loved him, and he her. When he mused, "If the parks be 'the lungs of London' we wonder what Greenwich Fair is—a periodical breaking out, we suppose—a sort of spring rash." There was a truth to that.

Her peasoupers were the result of coal smoke, when gone, London could breathe. The lungs of London's parks expanded. In the summer, her Catherine (Cat) Jones liked to get a sandwich at Pret at the end of Queensway and just sit in Kensington Gardens under a tree. Watch the world drift by.

The spot where the Marble Arch proclaimers come of a Sunday to tell the world their ideas. That very spot, or close enough, was where she once held public executions on what was the Tyburn tree. Actually, it's more like junction of Edgeware, Marble Arch, and Oxford, but London loved the story of Tyburn into Marble proclaimers Arch. Mr. Nigel Frump the Third loved to declaim that truth while standing beneath the Marble Arch on a plastic milk carton. He had a bubble gun.

The thing to remember is that people imagined her Big Ben with his bongs, but that is only one tower of her House of Commons and Lords. Her Savanya Jagathesan, under secretary to an undersecretary, liked to eat his curry and have a pint while listening to the sound.

She had her Tower of London, and London Bridge, and she'd added a spinning London Eye. Also, for some reason a Gherkin. She admitted eyes on the sides of her buildings to keep watch.

Someone that London belonged to said of her, "I love this great polluted place."

It was a simple truth that a City was made up of the people who live within him or her.

**Author's Note:**

> If after reading my fiction here, you would like to read more about me and my writing check out my profile.


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